A Neanderthal stone awl People have been using engineering to solve the problems of their daily lives since the first caveman picked up a rock and chipped away at it to make a handaxe. [...]
History of electricity: A bolt of lightning in the sky Why did it take so long to control electricity? Like other inventions, electricity took thousands of years to develop. For [...]
Woman using chamber pot (Athens, Greece, ca. 480 BC. Now in Berlin) Where did people go to the bathroom? Imagine if you had to leave your house and walk to [...]
A starry sky with the Milky Way galaxy(thanks to Bernd Nies) Early astronomy The very earliest people, as early as six million years ago, knew much more about the moon and the planets and the stars than most [...]
Roman sailing ship with square sails (100s AD, Bardo Museum, Tunisia) Until the First Punic War, in 264 BC, the Romans had not been sailors, and had never had a navy. But [...]
A copy of Ptolemy's map of the world Ptolemy was born in Egypt in about 90 AD, when the Romans were ruling Egypt. He was a Roman citizen. Probably he was the son or grandson of [...]
Roman medicine: Galen used surgical instruments like these What do we mean by Roman medicine? Roman medicine is really West Asian and African medicine. That's because most of the great [...]
Claudia Pieris' tombstone (CIL VI.15543) She lived 117-138 AD. Now in Copenhagen, at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. The Romans used several different systems for writing numbers. Sometimes they wrote numbers [...]
Roman mold-blown glass (100s AD) West Asian/African science under Roman rule What we call Roman science is a mixture of two different things. The first is the discoveries and inventions [...]
A medieval manuscript copy of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) What's Lucretius's backstory? Lucretius was born about 99 BC, in the later Roman Republic. Nobody knows anything about [...]
